Shooting in Bronx Came in Struggle to Oust Drug Gangs

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: July 1, 1996

After a high-speed gun battle that raged along 20 blocks in the South Bronx Saturday night, leaving one suspected drug dealer dead and another critically wounded, law enforcement officials said yesterday that they believed the men were part of a powerful gang that has been operating within the city-owned Bronx Terminal Market.

The shootout came as the city has struggled to wrest control of the food market from its landlord, who officials say has let it fall into a dilapidated haven for criminals. The Bronx Borough President, Fernando Ferrer, said the abandoned part of the market where the shooting began has increasingly served as a base for drug dealers and shady businesses, having long ago surrendered its role as a major food market for bodega owners.

The shootout began as a task force of city and state police officers and members of an elite unit of the Drug Enforcement Administration began their first major offensive against the drug gang, which calls itself Power Rules, by moving to arrest nine suspected members as they pulled into the terminal market south of Yankee Stadium.

While seven of the men surrendered peacefully, two men in a sedan, identified yesterday as Edwin Robles-Rodriguez, 42, and Thomas Arroyo, 22, began firing at the police through the windows of their car, and burst through a road block. Even after officers lobbed a stun grenade through one of their shattered windows, they managed to lead more than 20 police cars on a chase up the Grand Concourse and onto Fulton Avenue, where their car crashed to a halt. In the end, after a furious gunfight in which officers fired a fusillade of as many as 30 rounds, Mr. Robles-Rodriguez lay dead and Mr. Arroyo was struck several times. He was listed in critical condition yesterday at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center.

A spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration said yesterday that its investigators had been monitoring the gang's actions for about two months, and recently joined with city police officers, who had been conducting a much longer investigation, to arrest several members.

"It's a very violent gang known for the use of weapons and intimidation tactics," Robin Waugh, the spokeswoman, said.

Officials said its members ranged in age from 18 to 42 and had apparently been using several abandoned buildings inside the Bronx Terminal Market as a drug distribution center, doling out cocaine to street dealers who would then sell it on street corners around the Bronx.

"Gangs and dealers have been operating in the market like this for years," said Mr. Ferrer, who began an effort in 1993 to end the lease of the private company that runs the market. "Some use the abandoned, empty buildings. And you will also find that some of the businesses that pop up in there from time to time are not strictly kosher, either."

While it has been several years since loading docks 30, 31, and 32 at the market received their last truckloads of sugar cane, mangoes and other goods that once made the market a mecca for small bodega owners, residents who live nearby say that the docks and a few ramshackle buildings near them have not lain dormant since shipping companies left.

Instead, they said, they see a stream of vans and cars make their way day and night to the desolate end of the market. Simone Mack, a homeless woman who lives in an abandoned building with a view of the docks on 151st Street, said she had long assumed drug deals were going on because she had seen only cars and vans, and no trucks, at the site.

Mr. Ferrer, who joined with former Mayor David N. Dinkins three years ago to try to have the market legally condemned, criticized the police yesterday for moving against the drug dealers there only recently. "It seems to me astounding that they haven't figured out well before this that the Bronx Terminal Market has essentially become a haven for drug dealers," he said.

And he also accused Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of essentially abandoning efforts to have the market condemned, the first stage in a legal maneuver to seize control from the landlord, Strategic Development Concepts, previously known as the Arol Development Corporation, which was given a 99-year lease on the property by the city in 1972.

But Mr. Giuliani said yesterday that the city is still aggressively seeking to condemn the market. He noted that the market is included in a bill before the City Council that would require all city markets to conduct background checks on their businesses -- much like those now used at the Fulton Fish Market -- to weed out mob influence and other corruption.

"The Corporation Counsel has proceeded with the court action, and there has been no change in the intention," Mr. Giuliani said, adding that condemnation proceedings typically take several years. The city's request to condemn the market has been stayed by a judge, he said, a common development in such cases as the court reviews the arguments. "It's frustrating and annoying when you want to get something done, but it sometimes takes a while," he said.

But Mr. Giuliani said that even if the legal case lingers, the bill, if passed, could help law enforcement officials rid the market of businesses that might be operating as fronts for drug dealers. "The only plan when we came into office was to condemn the property," he said. "This will go a lot further."

Representatives of Strategic Development Concepts could not be reached by telephone for comment yesterday.

The market, nestled beneath the Major Deegan Expressway just south of Yankee Stadium, was built in the 1920's, and was once the city's premier ethnic wholesale food distribution center.

But in the late 1960's, it was overshadowed by the more modern Hunts Point Market and began a sharp decline.